Essays on trans, intersex, cis and other persons and topics from a trans perspective.......All human life is here.

This site is the most comprehensive on the web devoted to trans history and biography. Well over 1200 persons worthy of note, both famous and obscure, are discussed in detail, and many more are mentioned in passing - especially in the year-end summaries (see links in right sidebar.)

There is a detailedIndexarranged by vocation, doctor, activist group etc.

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11 October 2008

The Toraja (the people of the upland or of the north) people of Sulawesi (previously Celebes) in Indonesia are nowadays visited my many tourists who come to see unusually shaped houses, said to be inspired by the shape of a boat, and their elaborate funerals.

In 1902, when headhunting was but recently suppressed by the Dutch authorities, there was anxiety that the ancestral spirits might eat the villagers instead.

A woman named Liombee 'began a mejapi or religious retreat to the woods, and dressed in the evening like a male warrior, at which time the ancestral spirits spoke through her. Her prophecies did not come true, but this did not lessen her influence. It would be unnecessary now to plant the fields or care for livestock, and soon all the people would go to the upper-world without dying. Cultists built a long wooden structure on stilts to be rowed into the air, after the old idea that the tadu or shaman flew to the sky on a boat rowed by other spirits.'

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Announcement re year-end review

At the end of each year from 2008 to 2015 I did a year-end review of trans persons and events around the world. Each year it became bigger, and it has really become too big a task for one person. I hereby give notice that I will not be doing such a year-end review this year, or in future.

I will do some bits, especially the list of new books, but not the comprehensive survey that I have previously done.

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About Zagria

I have a social science degree. I spent several years in the 70s doing Gay Lib counselling, and moved on to organizing trans groups. I was rejected by the Clarke Institute (now CAMH) in the mid 1980s, probably because I do not match either of their stereotypes, but was accepted by Russel Reid on our first meeting in late 1987, and had surgery from James Dalrymple some months later. I have mainly worked as an IT consultant. I have been with the same husband for 44 years.